I lift my head and hit the speaker on my keyboard. But no matter how many times I turn the volume down, the pinging gets louder, more annoying, more demanding.
Oh my God, make it stop already.
Snarling, I push myself away from the keyboard and blink my eyes.
Oh. Right.
I’m actually home in bed. And it’s not Purry Furniture’s Instagram account pinging me nonstop.
That’s my alarm clock, and I grab at the phone like a blind octopus.
Crud.
It’s been going off for fifteen minutes straight, and it’s taken me this long to hear it. I’m down to my last emergency alarm. All because I didn’t leave the office last night until a quarter after one, and it’s a quarter until four in the morning now.
Sigh.
Does this jackoff function like this all the time? Or does he just expect his employees to?
A day this early feels inhuman.
I shake the thought from my head. If Heron sleeps less than four hours a night, it might explain why he’s always such a colossal prick in the skin of a god.
No time to shower, so I just do a quick ten-minute routine, splashing water on my face and pits and gargling mouthwash while I run through the apartment like a headless chicken. I pull on a black dress and Paige’s heels. She’s lent them to me indefinitely since I don’t have anything nicer for a place like HeronComm.
I have three missed calls from a number I don’t know.
Probably the driver.
So I run through the apartment while calling him back, hoping he hasn’t left without me.
I drop my phone in my purse when I see the black town car parked outside. No way he’s here for anyone else in this neighborhood. An older man with dark hair and friendly brown eyes gets out of the car and opens the door for me.
His smile says he’s been in my shoes before. At least I don’t feel judged.
“Thank you,” I say as I climb in.
I’m so tired my eyes hurt, but the nice thing about a driver is I can sit in the back seat and respond to some of the emails I didn’t get through before I left last night.
Once he’s back at the wheel, the driver says, “Miss Bristol? I’m Felix Armstrong, at your service. Call me by my last name like everybody else. We’ll probably be seeing each other a lot. I doubt Heron’s ever gonna let you walk home alone in the dark.”
“Nice to meet you, and you can call me Brina,” I say with a laugh. “I’m surprised. Mr. Heron doesn’t seem like the kinda guy to care about things like that.”
Armstrong’s otherwise friendly face becomes blanker. “Why not?”
I hesitate. Do I really want to strike up a conversation with my first co-worker ranting about the boss? Then again, if he’s been working here awhile...how could he not know?
“Well, considering the first time I met him he was barking at his people and ordering me off a public bench, he just doesn’t strike me as a Care Bear people person.”
“He sent me to pick you up this morning,” Armstrong offers, his warm smile returning.
“Because the bus isn’t running its morning schedule yet, I assume. Plus, he wants me to fetch his coffee and dry cleaning.”
“We also need to pick up new shoes...and there was one other thing I can’t remember,” Armstrong adds.
“Cat food. For some weird reason, he also wants me to pick up cat food and be at the office by five.”
Armstrong nods, his lips turning up in the mirror with a look that screams mischief. “He’s a hard-ass. I get it. I know he doesn’t always seem friendly with his employees. Part of that’s because he’s only thirty-one and can’t have his authority questioned. But most of the reason he walks around growling at people all day is because so much of this business depends on him. He has hundreds of employees, and if someone on the floor makes a mistake with ads, it could affect a lot of jobs. It was really hard for him to build the place up after...”
I look up from my phone as he trails off, suddenly interested. “What happened?”
“Oh, uh...” Armstrong shakes his head. “Sorry. Nothing you need to worry about. I only brought it up because he’s not as bad as you think. You’ve probably heard how fast he goes through EAs, but I promise you, if any of them took the time to know the man, they’d hate him less.”
I try not to frown, amazed that the bosshole has at least one vote of confidence.
“I can’t blame you for being skeptical,” Armstrong says, shaking his head. “Let’s be real. He’s demanding as hell, but he expects as much of himself as he does everyone else. Plus, he’s generous with his employees. There’s nowhere else I could ever dream of making what I get paid to drive around Mr. Heron and his crew.”